Power Plays

Our vlogging spree continues! This is only the second of the many vlogs we filmed at the same tinme, so we barely look fatigued at all yet! This week's theme is boons, knacks and powers, because you guys never run out of questions about those things. Never.

Question: If a player wants to dip into a new general purview, how should accessing these new powers be handled? Do they always need a new relic, or can divine forces add access to new purviews to old Birthrights? If the latter, is there any mechanics involved or is it a strictly storytelling decision when that happens?

Question: So, Scion of Hermes/Mercury. Super speedster, concept of "Flash wannabe". Assuming maximized Dexterity, Epic Dexterity, and Psychopomp to facilitate dash speed, what are your thoughts on the Justice League "around the world punch"? Ultimate Dexterity? Use of The Way? What about speed-based bonus damage? When you punch a person at Mach 17 in Scion, what happens?

Question: What kind of penalty/bonus should exist for sexual orientation? If Zeus tries to sleep with a straight guy or gay girl, do they get some moderate +X bonus to resist?

Question: The writeup of Emamu mentions "attacks made by Death or Health boons". Obviously negative Health boons can be used offensively, but what Death boon can hurt something that isn't a ghost?

Question: How many Avatars do you have to pop to make a planet? How do you accomplish anything meaningful in space without constantly using Avatars and Ultimates?

Question: Is it possible for a craft god like Hephaestus to use the Creator to "forge" a full grown adult Scion with human blood along his own ichor? The idea came to me when I read about Hephaestus' sentient robo-maids in the Iliad and thought it would be a neat concept. So, would this actually create a Scion, or would it be some kind of Lesser Immortal or construct?

Question: I have been immensely curious about something lately as I am going back through and reading the core rules, specifically about Animal. I've noticed that as the Scion Seth Farrow goes through his ascension, he begins to naturally look much more like a snake, which to me it seemed was implying an evolution in his natural state over time. How would this be done, handled or represented from both a player perspective and a ST perspective?

Question: Is it possible that Machu Pichu could be a massive Huaca (possibly to Inti)?

Question: In Scion, would you have storms without storm gods? That is, are ALL storms caused by storm gods, or are some (most?) storms natural unless the local storm god chooses to intervene? In Scandinavia, would ALL lightning be directly caused by Thor, or just some? As a corollary, if all storms are directly created by the storm gods more or less at their whim, how come meteorology often works? (This obviously goes for other phenomena as well, like sunrise or love, but storms make a nice example.)

Wandering from cosmology to sexuality to space travel. We are like frontier vlog pioneers.

Baby Boomers

Question: If a player character is pregnant and she wishes to use the Psychopomp Boon Unbarred Entry, would she also need to expend the cost for Come Along to bring the unborn children with her?

Ha, creative thinking! But no, the fetus is free. The same goes for any other Psychopomp boon, or for other boons that involve costs for extra people (The Milky Road, Deus Ex Machina, etc).

You could separate out a bunch of effects for pregnant person versus non-pregnant person, but honestly it doesn't help the game much to add a lot of complications and extra resource-spending. We also wouldn't want to make pregnant people roll Stamina + Fortitude separately for their tiny inmates whenever affected by things like poison or disease (because otherwise nobody above Legend 3 would ever have pregnancies survive to term), or force them to be constantly rolling to see if taking damage in a fight caused them to miscarry. While the sproutling is still physically inside and living off of its parent's body, it counts as part of that parent unless there are wild extenuating circumstances.

Of course, those extenuating circumstances can happen and be dramatically compelling, but unless an enemy is intentionally trying to make a player miscarry (either through violence, through some kind of curse or relic or through Curse of Frailty, which is the one boon that does affect unborn children), it's usually better left to cinematic dodging and stunting appropriate to the situation. Our pregnant PCs usually pick up a few precautionary measures like Blessing of Health or Invulnerable Nail, but so far they've all made it to birth if they wanted to.

We do, however, cause passing through strange landscapes to sometimes affect unborn children in the womb; for example, going to an Underworld while pregnant means there's a chance the fetus will die thanks to being mortal, even though it's still inside you, while some Terrae Incognita might cause bizarre effects and an unborn baby is probably vulnerable to sustaining changes or mutations (usually not for the better) from Titanrealms you pass through. The Scion who carries the baby might herself also affect its growth by shapechanging while pregnant or using certain powers that influence it, at Storyteller discretion.

Our players are eagerly awaiting the imminent birth of Eztli's and Sowiljr's latest spawn, which is the first PC baby that is fully god-level (they didn't Avatar down for conception) and has also been rampantly shapechanged and dragged through multiple Underworlds and Titanrealms during gestation within its eternally active mother. The betting pool on exactly what kind of monster it's going to be is still awaiting a verdict, but everyone's pretty thoroughly sure it won't be normal.

Titans, Love, Mystery

It's vlog time! Today, questions from the dwindling stock of backlog we're working through. We'll catch up yet!

Question: Do you think that Scion can be used as a fantasy romantic comedy, but still stay true to the myths? Would a setting like that resemble an episode of Bewitched, or would it look more like a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy?

Question: What stops someone who has The Way from using it outside a Titanrealm to create a path directly to an Avatar?

Question: So Adrasteia is Alison Margaritas' god name, but who was the goddess torturing her into apotheosis? I'm guessing Nemesis, and if so, who sent her?

Question: Do Titan Avatars have PSPs?

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story. --Neil Gaiman

What Dreams May Come

Question: I see that you have some dream-affecting boons in Illusion and Psychopomp. Where are some other places (if any) that would be appropriate for dream-affecting powers? Perhaps as an Epic Intelligence or Epic Manipulation Knack (or tree of Knacks) or a (and this may be stretching it a bit) Moon Boon?

In addition to Nocturnal Director in Illusion and Oneiric Visit in Psychopomp, Dream Wrack over in Justice also involves a target's dreams.

The second two are sort of specialty applications of their purviews; Oneiric Visit does travel through dreams but can't really affect them too much, making it more of an extension of Psychopomp's travel theme than a true dream-manipulation boon, and Dream Wrack, while definitely causing specific kinds of dreams, doesn't give the Scion much in the way of direct control over them.

For the most part, we tend to think of affecting dreams as something that falls within the Illusion purview's area of expertise most often. Most illusions are, after all, merely waking dreams, and Nocturnal Director is a very specific and concrete way of meddling around with the dreams of the sleeping as well. We've discussed adding new Illusion boons that have to do with dreams to the purview since it's an area that would probably be a neat expansion of Illusion's usually narrow focus, though at the moment we haven't come up with any really good ideas for new powers; it's in the queue with the rest of our collected new-boon detritus until such time as new APP boons wins on the poll or we are suddenly seized by divine inspiration to work on it. Our first preference would probably always be to shore up Illusion's already strong connection to dreams rather than outsourcing to other purviews too much.

However, I don't think that means there's no other room around Scion's landscape for other powersets to take a shot at it. Moon's not too bad a stretch, considering that some moon gods are associated with dreams (probably because they're associated with night and sleeping, but hey, run with it!); a boon that did something with the light of the moon influencing the dreams of sleepers, probably intensifying them to play into the concept of moonlight causing madness, could work. I'd also say that you might be able to come up with something in Darkness that had to do with causing nightmares (probably building up from Afraid of the Dark), since Darkness is usually the go-to purview for terror and the lurking demons of the mind. And while I don't think you'd necessarily need to add a new boon to Prophecy for dream-visions, I would totally allow a good stunt with Voice of Fate to send the prophetic visions into a target's dreams if he happens to be asleep at the time.

There's a lot less room to meddle with dreams in the Attributes; I can't think of many places I'd want to put dream-weaving in a knack, since it seems more like it fits over in the boons. I see where you're coming from with putting it in Intelligence to go with Grant Visions, but that's not really what that tree is about; you could use Grant Visions to project an image into someone's head, but it's not really the same thing as animating a scene the way you'd need to to affect their dreams, and adding that would pretty heavily infringe on what Illusion's already doing with it. However, I could see a specialty knack over in Manipulation, probably in the Instant Hypnosis/Implant False Memory tree, that implanted subconscious ideas and imagery in a target's head so that they dreamed of them the next time they went to sleep, sort of a delayed time-release kind of communication or way of influencing them (bonus! probably nobody but an Illusion god will be able to catch you doing it, too!).

Incidentally, there are in fact entire APPs built around dreams out there, written by fans; quite a few of them, actually, so if you're interested, check out examples A, B, C and D. While there are some interesting ideas in them, on the whole we don't think there's any need for a dedicated APP only about dreams; there are very few gods of dreams across world myth and few of them fulfill their roles in the same way, so while we love Gaiman's Sandman as much as the next kids, we probably won't be introducing an entire purview written only for him into the game.

Has anybody else out there done anything creative with dreams in Scion? We're always collecting ideas for that faraway APP boon workday!

The Pitter-Patter of Little Feet

Question: False Footsteps - isn't that supposed to be a roll of Dexterity or Wits + Survival? Generally rolls should be Attribute + Ability, and your site lists it as Stealth + Survival...

Ah, hilarious! You're right, that's totally a typo. The roll should actually be Dexterity + Stealth or Survival, reflecting that you can use either depending on the terrain you happen to be covering.

Thanks for the catch; it's been fixed!

Highway to Hell

Question: Spirit Lamp: Does it really fit in Psychopomp instead of Death? Underworld Portal is in Death, and really Spirit Lamp is the only power in Psychopomp that relates to the meaning of the word. It seems like more of a "Travel" Purview than Psychopomp.

Spirit Lamp is a total necessity for Psychopomp, but let's start with the rest of your question first!

We've actually talked about Psychopomp and its usage on this blog before. It's a strange purview, because while it fills a very, very necessary mythological role and is totally integral to the gods and their pantheons, it also tends to be used for other things by PCs more often than for its intended purpose.

Basically, Psychopomp is a purview that needs to exist. Psychopomps are an extremely important part of almost every culture's cosmology and pantheons, and they fulfill a function - that is, making sure the dead get where they need to go - that is paramount to keeping the world running correctly. Ancient cultures very much needed to know that A) dead people weren't going to be running around haunting the living, and B) when they died themselves someone would make sure they weren't lost and roaming, and psychopomps were thusly invented in almost every major mythology to take care of these big issues.

So the Psychopomp purview pretty much has to exist, the same way the Justice and Death and Fire purviews need to exist; it's a part of the mythic landscape that can't be ignored and permeates all cultures. It's true that many (in fact, most!) of its boons are just as easily suited to traveling around in non-psychopomping capacities as they are to actually doing the job of a psychopomp, but that's really more of a fringe benefit to being a psychopomp rather than the fundamental purpose of the purview. You will find very few Gods of Travel out there in the world; it's not a universal idea that an APP needs to represent, but psychopomping is. And we wouldn't want characters who became psychopomps to have no utility other than ferrying dead people around, because that would be very limited and usually take them out of the story with their band, and that would be lame. Psychopomp doesn't fit the mold of the other purviews, it's true, but it does exactly what it needs to do, both for the overarching mythic theme it represents and for players who want to pursue it in a game.

Which brings us back around to Spirit Lamp. It's an absolute necessity for psychopomps to do their jobs; Spirit Lamp, Come Along and whatever other boon they use to actually get their charges to the Underworld (usually Rainbow Bridge, but it really depends on the psychopomp and the situation) are the powers they cannot do without and still do their cosmically-ordained jobs. Spirit Lamp does at first look seem like it belongs in Death because it affects dead people and that's usually Death's entire thing, but a closer look debunks that idea pretty quickly; if there's one thing death-gods don't actually do, it's go around rounding up ghosts to put in their Underworld. And they don't do that because it's the psychopomp's mythic job, not theirs.

The disposition of the dead in a nutshell, mirrored perfectly by purviews.

I Roam Around Around Around

Question: What do y'all think of Psychopomp being named Psychopomp? That word has a very specific meaning and except for one-and-a-half Boons, the Purview doesn't have anything to do with it. Why not call it Journeys or Wayfarer or somethin'?

Partly because my own reaction is to immediately think that, and I mean this to come with all the love in the world because I know some of you very fine and intelligent people use those names and there is nothing at all wrong with them, Journeys and Wayfarer sound lame to me. I can't imagine using either name. I guess the closest one that wouldn't make me make a face is probably Travel, but I don't love it.

Honestly, I actually don't have a problem with Psychopomp's name. Aside from its obvious coolness factor, the entire purview is, I think, designed to be used for psychopomping; it's just a pleasant side effect that it can do other things as well. Spirit Lamp and Come Along are the souls of the purview, and everything else is pretty much intended to be used along with them. The purview does a very good job of really supplying every tool a psychopomp could possibly need to do their job, which is something other purviews (looking at you, Death) don't always do, and furthermore it does it with such wide scope that it's appropriate for psychopomps of every culture, from Hermes to Ogma to Xolotl and so forth.

It's a weird purview, because it's totally necessary to the divine landscape, but if you wanted to make a Psychopomp purview that could only be used to escort dead people, you'd end up with just Spirit Lamp and Come Along. Psychopomp's a very narrow job and a very narrow concept, but it's hugely important and has many hugely important gods doing it, so you can't just throw it away and tell them all to get Death. Scion's solution, to give the purview as many boons that are useful for psychopomping as possible, is an elegant one; not only does it give psychopomps plenty of options for doing their jobs, it also lets them have a purview that is not totally useless at all other times.

So I'm pretty comfortable with the name, to be honest. It'd be nice if there were some perfect term that covered everything and didn't sometimes make me raise an eyebrow, because I'm totally with you on the occasional feeling that psychopomp Scions don't bother with much psychopomping... but as far as I know there isn't, so Psychopomp seems like the best (and coolest) option out there.